Download NON-FINITE COMPLEMENTS OF PERCEPTION VERBS Mihaela

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NON-FINITE COMPLEMENTS OF PERCEPTION VERBS
Mihaela Manasia, Assist, Prof., PhD, ”Constantin Brâncuși” University of Târgu-Jiu
Abstract: This paper focuses on the non-finite verbal complements of perception verbs from a
cross-linguistic perspective. It is known that verbs of perception are likely to receive different
types of interpretations partly determined by the very choice of the verb, syntax of its
complements and context. Due to space limitations, the main objective of our study is to
identify the correlation between the semantic types of complements and their syntactic forms.
Keywords: non-finite complements, verbal complements, verbs of perception, cross-linguistic
analysis.
Non-finite verbal complements of perception verbs represent an important type of
complementation for this class of verbs. The non-finite clause is formed by a noun phrase
functioning as a subject and a non-finite verb (an infinitive, an -ing form). In English nonfinite clauses are of three types: the full infinitive, bare infinitive and -ing forms.
The construction with a full infinitive is specific to English and is also called the toinfinitive. According to Helle (2006 qtd Schule 2000: 51), this construction consists of an
accusative logical subject followed by the infinitive marker to, the verb in the infinitive and –
if transitive – an accusative object.
It is used only with passive verbs:
(1) “a. It was followed by the entrance of a young man whom I at once saw to be a
foreigner. (Miller 2003a qtd James)
b. He looked back and saw it to belong to Videl. (Miller 2003a)
c. The wind was gentler than he remembered, the rocks somehow less harsh, and when
he had risen above the level of the land, he saw it to have become greener, more fertile, more
welcoming. (Miller 2003a)”
Example (1a) is typical given that the verbal phrase contains the term be. The second
one includes the purely stative verb belong. The sentences would be ungrammatical if to were
removed without further modification. On the other hand, they all allow a reasonable
paraphrase by a that-clause. The impossibility of direct perception is confirmed by a potential
difference between the time of the perceived event and time of perception like in (340c),
because of the incompatibility of direct perception and perfect infinitive (to have become).
Declerck (1982) observes that the to-infinitive complement is impossible with the verb
‘watch’, given its incompatibility with indirect perception. These uses of perception verbs are
similar to those of the cognitive verbs ‘know’ and ‘believe’, which confirms once again the
connection between indirect perception and cognition.
Romanian and French do not have at their disposal any non-finite complementation
corresponding to the above examples.
The association verb of perception and bare infinitive prototypically reproduces an act
of direct perception of an event. Besides the experiencer subject, there is also the perceived
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participant (for instance her, people) who is responsible for the process expressed by the
infinitive:
(2) a. Engl. I saw her close the door.
Fr. Je l’ai vu claquer la porte.
b. Eng. You hear people accuse the government of ruining the country economy.
Fr. Vous entendez les gens accuser le gouvernement de ruiner l’économie du pays.
“In most Indo-European languages, the direct perception of an event is represented by
the construction [perceiver NP1 + perception verb + perceived participant NP2 + infinitive].
In French, the position of the perceived participant varies: it can be anteposed or postposed to
the infinitive.” (Enghels 2009: 763). However, linguists have demonstrated that the opposition
between direct and indirect perception is a continuum, and that the boundary between the two
categories is not very clear. It is therefore appropriate to consider, based on examples,
whether the infinitive construction is only a direct perception process. Declerck (1983)
examines the hypothesis according to which this construction potentially contains deductive
elements and thus denotes processes of indirect perception. In ‘I see Peter run to his house’
some prior knowledge would allow me to conclude that Peter runs to his house and not
somewhere else. We know where Peter lives and we conclude based on our observation that
he is running in a certain direction in order to go home.
Similarly to Declerck (1982), in the above examples we do not offer an interpretation
in terms of indirect perception given that the deduction process is not a prolonged reflection
as in the real acts of indirect perception:
(3) I see what you mean.
Indeed, ‘I see Peter run to his house’ represents a process of physical and concrete
direct perception. Thus, the infinitive construction appears to be confined to the field of direct
perception.
Cornilescu (2012:19) also highlights the fact that the characteristics of the infinitive
construction derive from the semantics of physical perception and insists upon the
simultaneity between the events in the main and subordinate clauses. The presence of a time
adverbial would necessarily affect both events: ‘I saw the boy arrive yesterday’.
Other properties mentioned refer to the impossibility of negating the infinitive clause
(*I heard him not enter) and its incompatibility with “any other sentence-level adverbs, such
as speaker-oriented or modal adverbs” (Cornilescu 2012 qtd Bennis and Hoeckstra 1989)
This complementation structure is only specific to English and French while its
presence in Romanian would be ungrammatical:
(4) Engl. I heard the boy leave.
Ro. –
Fr. J’ai entendu le garçon partir.
The –ing form complement1 represents the next important non-finite complementizer
which fully deserves our attention. It can be found in a significant number of languages and
corresponds to a process of direct perception.
As we shall further see, various linguists also refer to –ing forms as gerunds or participles. We accept all this
terminology but we shall only use that of –ing forms because we view it as having a larger sphere, including the
other two terms as well.
1
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In English, cases where perception verbs are followed by a sequence made up of a
noun phrase (NP) and an –ing form are quite frequent. Opinions differ regarding the status of
this construction. Although many envisage it as a unified unit, other scholars (Kortmann
1995, Quirk 1985, Langacker 1991, etc.) consider that there are sufficient semantic, syntactic
and cognitive reasons for treating it as a unit composed of two separate constituents. “The
treatment of this construction (NP and an –ing form) as two different constituents implies that
the –ing form functions as a participle, where the NP is the direct object of the main verb and
the –ing form is an adjunct depictive of the NP; whereas the interpretation of this construction
as a single unit functions as a direct object of the main verb”. (Gomez Castejon, 2007: 36)
From a semantic point a view, the construction with the NP and the –ing form
expresses an event interpreted as the direct object of the main perception verb. According to
Duffley (1999: 227), the direct object behaves as the element ‘that which is/was [verb]ed’.
For instance, in ‘They hear the dog barking’ ‘that which is heard’ is both the noun phrase the
dog and the action denoted by the –ing form - ‘barking’ and not only one of these elements.
This would be an argument in favour of the treatment as a whole unit.
To this semantic argument, others of a syntactical nature are added:
the use of a genitive or possessive pronoun:
They hear the dog’s barking/the barking of the dog / its barking.
the compatibility with pseudo-cleft sentences:
What they heard was the dog barking/the dog’s barking.
the use of the pronoun it or that:
We heard it/that.
Nevertheless, the analysis of this structure as a whole is incompatible with the passive:
*The dog barking was heard. (by us)
The dog was heard.
We shall no longer insist upon the interpretation of this structure either as a unified or
separate unit because it is not an essential aspect in our research. The same sequence of a
noun phrase and the equivalent of the –ing is also characteristic of the Romance languages
under investigation:
(5) Engl. I see Ann doing the dishes.
Ro. O văd pe Ana spălând vasele.
Fr. Je vois Anne faisant la vaisselle.
The common characteristic of this structure is the fact that in all three examples the
noun phrase functions as a direct object while the gerund is an “adjunct depictive”
(Borgonovo, 1996: 3).
Similarly to the infinitive construction, the –ing form complement is characterized by
compulsory temporal simultaneousness of the main and subordinated events. However,
differences still exist at the level of aspectual relationships. The perceived event begins either
before, continues and ends (or not) simultaneously with the moment of perception, or begins
and ends with the act of perception. The first scenario describes the development of the events
in ‘I see Mary preparing dinner’ while the second corresponds to ‘I see Mary prepare
dinner’. The first fundamental difference between the –ing form and the infinitive
complement consists, of an aspectual contrast between progressive and non-progressive.
Therefore, the opposition –ing form vs. infinitive is usually described in terms of
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imperfectivity and perfectivity. The –ing form denotes any moment in the development of a
process without regard to its beginning or end, while the use of the infinitive implies a total
and perfective consideration of the perceived event. Examples such as ‘He saw the woman
drown’ and ‘I saw my dog die’ show the subordinated event in its totality: ‘the woman
drowned’ and ‘the dog is dead’. On the contrary, examples with the gerund ‘He saw the
woman drowning (but she was rescued)’ and ‘I saw my dog dying’ do not imply the
achievement of a final point: the woman was drowning but they were able to save her and my
dog is not necessarily dead.
-Ing forms express a non-accomplished process while the infinitive construction
represents a completed event.
Recently, it has been argued that the infinitive is rather neutral in aspect than
perfective. The infinitive is aspectually and temporally unmarked because it focuses both on
the culmination of the event but also on its beginning and development. Nevertheless, this
distinction was not accepted by all linguists. After identifying two types of progressives in
Spanish, namely, real and pseudo progressives, Porras (1984:282) considers –ing forms
following verbs of perception to be a pseudo-progressive imposing a static perspective: “[…]
the situation reported by the speaker in a gerundial perception verb complement is said to be
statively interpreted because it is conceived as the perception of just a portion of the whole,
situation which is supposed to be expanded backwards as well as forwards and thus there are
previous and subsequent segments of the same situation which are not captured by the
experiencer because of the nondurative condition of the perception.” Thus, the –ing form and
infinitive complement impose both a static and dynamic perspective on the perceived event.
The same idea is endorsed by Van der Meer (1994: 477-479) when referring to the
English ‘-ing’ structure: “[…] the construction with –ing gives a static, frozen picture,
whereas that with bare infinitive gives a dynamic picture. […] After verbs of perception -ing
participles as object complements, in the construction under discussion, refer to situations the
object is perceived in.”
Nevertheless, Souesme (1990) does not accept the distinction between the –ing form
and infinitive complements only in terms of aspectual interpretation. On the contrary, the
author believes that the variation between these two non-finite forms of the verb
fundamentally changes the interpretation of the phrase. The use of the –ing form would imply
that the identified event is prior to perception and that the speaker recognizes the existence of
previous occurrences of the process. By using the infinitive in (6a), for example, the speaker
let the others know that s/he does not steal and never will, while the use of the –ing form in
(6b) only allows her / him to say that s/he has never been seen performing the process of
stealing, although s/he steals:
(6) a. You have never seen me steal.
b. You have never seen me stealing.
These two types of constructions differ not only in terms of aspectual relationships but
also from a syntactic point of view. On the one hand, the possible coordination of an infinitive
and an –ing form points to a structural similarity of the two complements.
(7) I heard the child enter the house and his mother yelling at him.
On the other hand, the absence of corresponding sentences has led several authors to
conclude that there are structural differences between the two complements:
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(8) I saw my hope die / dying.
While waiting, they saw a man feeding / feed the dog.
The class of perception verbs which accepts both ing and infinitive complements
appears to be an interesting one as these syntactic differences are sometimes correlated with
differences in the semantic features of the two constructions. Based on a series of tests, Di
Tullio (1998) proves that the –ing form complement differs from the infinitive complement
according to the number of the constituents it contains: always one in the case of the infinitive
construction and often two for the –ing form. Some of the tests he proposes refer to the
autonomy of the –ing form complement relative to the main clause, which allows for its
displacement towards the beginning of the sentence comparatively with the infinitive
complement which does not admit such a dislocation; the compatibility of the passive with the
–ing form and incompatibility with the infinitive (Mary was seen reading a novel /*read a
novel). We shall not insist upon the exhaustive presentation of the tests because it is not
within the scope of our research given that some of them do not apply in the case of the
languages under investigation.
Fernandez Lagunilla (2003:93) states that the use of the infinitive construction implies
that what is perceived is always the event, whereas with the –ing form, there is a possible
ambiguity between the perception of an event and that of an entity. Indeed, in (a), we see the
event of Peter leaving home while (b) is interpreted either as ‘We see Peter who is leaving
home’, or as ‘Leaving home, we ourselves see Peter’:
(9) a. We saw Peter leave home.
b. We saw Peter leaving home.
Even though the above observations reveal the interesting possibility of a more
complex contrastive study of the –ing form and the infinitival one, because of space
limitations we shall not go in-depth.
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